Eugène Ionesco

Ionesco in 1976. Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Updated March 28, 2009

By Mel Gussow

EugèneIonesco's wildly innovative plays, among them "Rhinoceros," "The Bald Soprano" and "The Chairs," overturned conventions of contemporary theater and had a profound effect on a new generation of playwrights. He died on March 28, 1994, at 84 in Paris, where he lived.

A revival of his 1962 play "Exit the King" opened on Broadway on March 26, 2009, starring Geoffrey Rush and Susan Sarandon. Ben Brantley in The Times called the revival "brutally funny" and said that Mr. Rush's performance's was like "a fire-trailing comet."

Ionesco's "anti-plays" satirized modern society while discovering new uses of language and theatrical techniques. Inspired by silent film clowns and vaudeville, he was a playful playwright, clownish in his own personality as well as in his work onstage. With outrageous comedy, he attacked the most serious subjects: blind conformity and totalitarianism, despair and death. Repeatedly he challenged - and accosted - the audience and his critics. As he said, "The human drama is as absurd as it is painful."

Along with Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet, he was one of a trinity of pioneering experimental playwrights who lived and worked in Paris. Although there were thematic bridges among the three, Ionesco's distinction was in his fanciful surrealism and sense of Dada. Among the playwrights he influenced were Tom Stoppard, Fernando Arrabal, Edward Albee, Tina Howe and Christopher Durang. Ionesco was among the playwrights often grouped as practitioners of the Theater of the Absurd. He objected to the label, preferring, he said, the Theater of Derision.

In his work, he turned drawing-room comedy on its head ("The Bald Soprano"), had a stage filled with empty chairs ("The Chairs") and transformed man into beast ("Rhinoceros"). Although his playwriting career did not begin until he was 40, he wrote 28 plays as well as several books of memoirs. The plays have been performed around the world in various languages. Throughout his career, he was an imaginative iconoclast who could create the most bizarre imagery.

"Rhinoceros," in its 1961 Broadway production, proved to be his breakthrough play, enriched by Zero Mostel's virtuosic performance, in which he transmogrified himself from man to rhinoceros without altering his makeup or costume. Roaring, bellowing, hilarious Mostel put the playwright on the international theatrical map, and "Rhinoceros" ran for 241 performances. But the play was only one of many that insured Ionesco's stature.

Despite his reputation for controversy, he saw himself as a preserver of theater, a classicist and "a supreme realist." He insisted that he wrote archetypes, not stereotypes. As he said in 1958, "I believe that the aim of the avant-garde should be to rediscover - not invent - in their purest state, the permanent forms and forgotten ideals of the theater." He added: "I make no claim to have succeeded in this. But others will succeed, and show that all truth and reality is classical and eternal."

He was born in Slatina, Romania, on Nov. 26, 1909, although he took three years off his age and claimed 1912 as his birth year, presumably because he wanted to have made his name before the age of 40. His father was Romanian, his mother French.

As a child, he lived in Paris. In an article titled "Experience in the Theater," he remembered his introduction to a world that would preoccupy him for a lifetime. The Punch and Judy show in the Luxembourg Gardens fascinated him as the puppets "talked, moved, clubbed each other." It was, he said, "the spectacle of the world itself . . . presented itself to me in an infinitely simplified and caricatured form, as if to underline its grotesque and brutal truth."

In 1922, he returned to Romania, where he went to high school and later studied at Bucharest University. At first he wrote poetry, not plays (except for a historical drama he wrote at 13). In 1939, he moved back to France and worked for a publisher. He became a French citizen and remained there for the rest of his life. During World War II, he and his wife were in hiding in the south of France.

"The Bald Soprano" ("La Cantatrice Chauve") was inspired by his own attempts to learn English by using an English-French conversational manual. Copying out phrases, he realized he was relearning obvious truths, that there are seven days in a week and that the ceiling is above, the floor below. Carrying that premise to ridiculous, word-spinning heights, he wrote his first play -- and no bald soprano appeared onstage. An actor improvised those words, and Ionesco seized upon them and changed the play's title from "English Made Easy."

The play was intended, he said, as "a parody of human behavior and therefore a parody of theater, too." Presented in 1950 at the tiny Theatre des Noctambules in Paris, it received some initially hostile reviews but became the catapult for his career.

"The Bald Soprano" was quickly followed by "The Lesson" (1951), "Jack, or the Submission" and "The Chairs" (1952) and "Victims of Duty" (1953), all of which certified his avant-garde credentials. In "Amedee, or How to Get Rid of It" (1954), a corpse grows larger and larger until it takes over the stage, and in "The New Tenant" (1956), a man rents a new apartment and the furniture takes over the stage. These and other works are filled with sight gags and silent comedy as well as intricate plays on words.

"Rhinoceros" brought him his widest public. Jean-Louis Barrault starred in the play in Paris and Laurence Olivier in London. But it was the Broadway production, directed by Joseph Anthony and starring Mostel and Eli Wallach, that brought him his greatest celebrity. "Rhinoceros" and other plays charted the progress of Mr. Ionesco's Everyman, a character named Berenger. In 1968, Ellis Raab directed "Exit the King," about a king named Berenger, on Broadway.

In 1970, he was elected a member of the French Academy. In his address to the Academy, he spoke of his faith in illogicality, the confusion of rules and the impotence of intelligence.

On a number of occasions, he visited the United States, in 1988 for the first New York International Festival of the Arts. He delivered a lecture titled "Who Needs Theater Anymore?" His pithy answer: "Tout le monde." Looking back at "The Bald Soprano," he said that at the time "it was a pleasure to destroy language." Now, he said, he found "the disintegration of language tragic." - From the 1994 New York Times obituary

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Ionesco's Plays

Eugène Ionesco wrote 28 plays, including several evenings of short sketches. Most of his plays were published by Grove Press in the United States and by Gallimard in France. These are among his principal works, with the date of first production.